Ashton Kutcher Must Be Stopped (Before He Corrupts Our Laptops)

It's a little-known fact that celebrity Ashton Kutcher moonlights as a Lenovo engineer. At first, it was tolerable: a kickstand here, a bigger battery there. But now, the chisel-cheeked entrepreneur has twisted Lenovo's latest tablets to his own foul aims: the new Yoga Tablet 2 Pro has a built-in projector.And a subwoofer. And a 13-inch, 2560 x 1440 screen. It's a goddamn miniature movie theatre, complete with a tiny Ashton to show you around the place.

Sure, it's only a run-of-the-mill Android tablet otherwise, with a quad-core 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor, 32GB of storage, and a 9600mAh battery rated for 15 hours (or three in projector mode), but it doesn't take much to corrupt impressionable youth, no? Would you want Ashton to babysit your kids with a movie beamed from this $US499 portable projector? I thought not.

And that's before you consider that the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro isn't alone: it's merely the flagship for an entire new series of Ashton-inspired machines. Each of the four additional Yoga Tablet 2 devices has a hole cut into the kickstand so you can hang it on the wall like the world's most awkward picture frame. Each has USB-OTG so you can use them to charge your phone.

(Why four models? Because you've got your choice of Android or Windows on either an 8-inch or 10-inch screen, and because the $US399 10-inch Windows model comes with a snap-on magnetically attached Bluetooth keyboard in an attempt to seem all Surface Pro-like. $US249 for 8-inch Android, $US299 for 10-inch Android or 8-inch Windows.)

Who knows what horrors Ashton might come up with next? I don't even want to imagine what he might do with our precious ThinkPads. And remember: it's only a matter of time before Lenovo owns Motorola too. Sure, the company will tell you it's all based on user research, but we know the truth.

You need to ask? Seriously? If Sean's tongue was poked any further into his check it would make a hole. I mean, seriously, look at these things - they are beautiful and seem like they will also be plenty capable. The only downside is storage - why not 64Gb internal with support for 128Gb microSD cards (they are only good for 64Gb cards, apparently)?

The 10" Windows version, the one in the bottom photo with the keyboard, looks like it could replace most average users' laptops, especially with its microHDMI out to connect it to a bigger screen. I'll be pre-ordering a 4G version the day they go up on Lenovo's Australian website, even though it will be Au$579 here (without 4G).

No but the Android versions are already up for pre-order so it shouldn't belong. That said, I had to wait around 6 weeks for my ThinkPad 8 so it could be close to Xmas before you can get one in your hands. JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman will also be selling them so they might have better info.

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